JakeR wrote:I'm with Andrea - I wouldn't burn any kind of plastic. It just puts too many funky chemicals in the air.

There's been a big debate around here (Gloucestershire) about the viability of a waste incinerator. I heard some of it on Radio 4 a month or so back. It would seem that they will be burning plastics (if they get the go ahead) but I don't know/can't remember what they do about the nasty chemicals. I would have thought that the contribution made by nappies would be negligible in comparison. It would seem that the incinerator is only marginally green by the time you factor in transport and the energy costs of producing plastic bottles. You only get back about 20% of the energy used to make a plastic bottle by burning it.

Perhaps you could scrape the poo off the nappy, dry it and use it as fuel?

Malc

High in the sky, what do you see ?
Come down to Earth, a cup of tea
Flying saucer, flying teacup
From outer space, Flying Teapot

To be honest I'd never really thought about burning the nappies, I suppose they just seemed to wet to really be worth it as fuel. We used some disposables when my daughter was young and I did try taking some apart as advice from tinerweb said that the gel component was compostable although it wasn't the nicest of jobs. I did wonder afterwards whether it would be possible to compost the whole nappy and "simply" sieve out the plastic at the end of the process. You would still have to dispose of the plastic of course.

I have read somewhere that the gel in the nappies that does the absorbing is quite a good thing to put into flower pots/hanging baskets to hold water. You can buy a commercial product to do the same thing. Whether you'd want to use the gel out of a used nappy though is another matter

Malc

High in the sky, what do you see ?
Come down to Earth, a cup of tea
Flying saucer, flying teacup
From outer space, Flying Teapot

Nappies contain SAPs (super absorbing polymers) even the ones that are biodegradable for a big part. These polymers are "plastics" that turn into a gel when they absorb water. This makes composting them a bit difficult. I have 4 month old twins and have thought about nappy processing a lot. Burning them causes air pollution but if they are taken to a landfill the nappies will produce a lot of methane which is 20 times more powerful then CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Digesting them in to biogas isn't possible because of the plastics. Composting them brings the SAPs in the soil..

I don't understand how something can be "green" because its largely biodegradable, the 30% that isn't makes it impossible to process the nappies in a clean way, thus making them just as bad as the normal nappies.

There is no good way to dispose of disposable nappies, whatever you do with them, they will hurt the environment..

If you are going to burn them, dry them (how?) first and burn them in the hottest possible fire, this reduces the air polution significantly..

Just looking back at the messages on this thread and noticed I posted a suggestion of using washables. It makes me laugh becuase now I have a child of my own and have used almost entierly disposables! Little did I know back then what a faff washables were compared with disposables.

I don't think we even considered washables. When you're coping with a new child, post natal depression, husband with irregular work patterns, child who seems to be collicky/clingy and so on, you really don't want to take the washable option.

Mined ewe, there should be a market for a biodegradeable disposable nappy if someone could invent and market it.

Malc

High in the sky, what do you see ?
Come down to Earth, a cup of tea
Flying saucer, flying teacup
From outer space, Flying Teapot

Oh Yes! Little ones nappies go on the woodburner,the weighing factor for me was seeing the amount of nappies one baby would use in a year going into landfill! Yes,there are chemicals that get put into the air as a result of them burning but weighed against the amount that cars and industry pollute the atmosphere that amount is miniscule.We tried washable nappies with DS2 but then worried about the amount of energy it took to wash them {both elecricity and ours!} and the detergent used {at that time a bio washing powder but now use soda crystals} so on the fire they go {along with those time of the monthers!} a little ash and thats all thats left.